The SMOC Project: A Series of Events Which Some May Dub as Laborious, Others as Amazing, and Others Still as Rather Insane

For any of you who didn’t know, the last two weeks of my life have been relatively swamped… ok, they’ve been really swamped. Whoever said summer was supposed to be relaxing? The last two weeks have been busy due to my new internship at Longview Fibre, and... finishing up the SMOC Project, a research project that me and my buddies have been working on for the past semester, and if the title did not convince you of the many points of view from which the last two weeks of this project may be… well… viewed, allow me to break it down for you in a slight calendar fashion.

Two weeks ago.

All was well. The school year was over, and only one experiment remained to be done. The team needed three major points for the paper. Two of them were completed and checked with the professor for necessary accuracy. The paper wasn’t due until May 25^th, so some evenings in the lab combined with Saturday experiments should be more than enough to finish the last experiment and write up the results.

Nine days ago

With our mindset of relaxation and ease, I received this email from our professor. He’s been helping us a lot from beginning to end, from getting grants to helping open doors in research for us. I was more than shocked up this email showing up in my inbox:

I am really worried about this project. We planned to submit the paper next Friday [A full week before we thought it was due], however we still haven't achieve any meaningful results yet. Usually, three well-presented results are needed for a paper. The [first point you had] is useless… Then we can start to work on other two results - which we have no clue yet.

Is anyone of you willing to work nights and weekends to get the paper done? I can be around any time you want. Otherwise, I am afraid we have to withdraw the paper...Please let me know who can work on this project and when.

Thanks,

After I woke up from my faint, I began to panic: we thought we had two out of three of these points done… and now it seemed we had none. Instantly, my calendar began getting full: I had no free evenings. Not to mention that this was on top of work, which required me to leave home at 6:00, and now I was getting home at about 10:00. I know that this is a normal day for some people, and I now have a great respect for them: I was completely not expecting this type of schedule though… I had no idea if we would make it, but now, we are more than making it… we are now finishing up the final edits, with the paper being submitted to a conference and to a scientific journal... but you'll have to read the next post to find out what happened to get us here...

Part II will be in a few days… now that I have time to post!